“I’ve always been a good imitator. I love music. But I’m just not that original,” said James Murphy, bandleader and songwriter of LCD Soundsystem, to The New Yorker a few weeks ago. It’s true, Murphy’s music is many things, original not being one of them, but that’s the point. LCD Soundsystem is a great band because, like all great rock bands, Murphy distills his influences (namely Brian Eno, ’90s House, and New York in the late ’70s) and re-formats them in his own unique style.
     Murphy made his creative breakthrough as LCD Soundsystem with 2007’s Sound of Silver, a giant leap beyond his 2005 self-titled debut. This Is Happening, supposedly Murphy’s last under the LCD moniker, doesn’t have as many breakout moments as Silver — it doesn’t reach the peaks of “Someone Great”, “All My Friends”, or “New York I Love You…” — but it doesn’t reach Silver’s relative lows either. The result is a more consistent, though flatter sounding, album.

Buy this at iTunes.

Though hardly a stranger in photography circles, Rosalind Solomon is gradually gaining prominence in the mainstream. After four decades trekking Japan, Guatemala, Peru, India, Nepal, South Africa, and Poland with a medium format point and shoot, the veteran photographer and recent octogenarian is being celebrated in New York in multiple ways. Her single-artist exhibition, RITUAL (now on view at Bruce Silverstein Gallery through June), and the MoMA’s Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography (taking place nearly twenty-five years after her first Ritual show at the MoMA) feature the artist in bold documentary form. Reflecting an ongoing theme in her work, RITUAL documents private meditation and communal rites binding people of various cultures. A humanist to the core, Solomon captures expressions sharpening the ebb and flow of ordinary existence.
     Known for her window-into-the-world immediacy rendered via the use of square format and strobe lighting, Solomon’s work has often been likened to that of Diane Arbus (with both women’s penchant for deviant subject matter only augmenting the comparison — the former favoring battered baby dolls, the latter, society’s castoffs).

As we grow more and more distressed by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it’s a good time to remember Newtown Creek, a similarly devastated body of water that runs right through Brooklyn and Queens. Once teeming with plant and animal life, the creek was polluted by decades of industrial dumping, and by the gradual leakage of 17 million gallons of oil from underground storage tanks. More than ninety-five acres of water and land were spoiled. Although a clean-up was undertaken in the 1990’s, the area remains too toxic for conventional development and was recently added to the EPA’s Superfund National Priorities List.
     Brooklyn-based photographer Anthony Hamboussi traveled the length of the creek from 2001 to 2006 to compile Newtown Creek: A Photographic Survey of New York’s Industrial Waterway. His images poignantly capture the remains of what was once a thriving industrial culture. Waterfront plots are built up with factories, warehouses, silos,  smokestacks, and shipping piers, many abandoned and in disrepair. The creek itself is visible only in low, dark stretches, frozen in the winter and fetid in the summer. It looks more like a sewer than a natural body of water. Some factories along the shores remain active, but the only signs of natural life are weeds sprouting up through the paving.

NEOZOON, a street art collective based in Paris and Berlin, forces us to confront the ways in which we relate to animals. The group’s initial project was to take discarded fur coats and cut them into animal shapes, which it pasted to city surfaces. The artwork was often site-specific. In Berlin, for example, the coats were recycled to look like bears, because of the city’s official mascot and the two bears who live in a small enclosure for public viewing in the middle of the city. The fur coat animals force the realization that the pelts were once the skins of living animals, and thus provoke consideration of the public’s celebration and simultaneous exploitation of the captive creatures. In Paris, the collective created a flock of fur-coat lambs that innocently meandered its way across city walls toward Parc de la Villette, which was the site of some of the largest slaughterhouses in 19th-century Europe.
     The latest project by NEOZOON is the non-toed fur-coatie: Pellicusia Urbana. Continuing the collective’s exploration of public attitudes toward captive animals, the non-toed fur-coaties are upcycled fur coats stuffed with moving machinery that creates an effect eerily similar to that of a living, breathing animal. Zoos in the German cities of Münster and Magdeberg have populated a few of their cages with the fur-coaties, complete with signs and descriptions. The fake creatures have also been spotted in public parks and playgrounds throughout Berlin.

As a Seattle native, the photographer Eirik Johnson has been a life-long witness to the detrimental environmental effects of the logging and fishing industries in the Pacific Northwest. Sawdust Mountain, Johnson’s collection of photographs published by Aperture, is a simple, honest, and melancholy book which looks at the precariously intertwined relationships between these industries, the people who rely on them, and the way in which such machinations affect the natural world.
     Sawdust Mountain makes painfully clear the fragility of these industries’ dependence on natural resources while also evoking a sense of nostalgia for a fast-disappearing way of life. Viewed as a whole, the collection of photographs unveils the devastating uncertainty of the region’s future. Ultimately, these pictures make clear that fishing and logging are, at best, perilously sustainable. In this way, although Sawdust Mountain focuses on the Pacific Northwest, it speaks to global environmental issues.

Sawdust Mountain is on view through June 10 at Aperture Gallery in New York; the book is available at aperture.org.

Jens Stoltze is a photographer and editor-in-chief of S Magazine, a fashion/erotica bi-annual out of Denmark with a strong creative nexus in New York. He recently exhibited this work at the Dactyl Foundation in New York City, following a personal and photographic sojourn in Brazil. The show comes down today, May 24, so this is your last chance to check it out in person. Those interested in obtaining a print can inquire via the gallery at www.dactyl.org.

Dactyl is located at 64 Grand Street.

In light of the recent cloud of volcanic ash that stymied travel plans throughout Europe, many people might not be feeling so fondly toward the arctic region’s geographic particularities. Here to provide a counterpoint perspective is Ragnar Th. Sigurdsson, a native Icelander and member of the Explorers Club who has worked as a photographer for more than thirty years. In 1985 Sigurdsson established Arctic-Images, a studio and graphic-work firm that pioneered the use of digital equipment in Iceland. His incredible ARCTIC IMAGES collection of photographs captures the awe-inspiring span of natural forms found in the arctic.
     Occasionally reminiscent of the best CGI in recent science fiction and fantasy films, the bizarre and magnificent landscapes captured by Sigurdsson provide a humbling view of our planet: what human forms and structures appear in his photographs are shadowed in comparison to the expansive arctic sky, looming glaciers, mountain ranges and volcanic eruptions. The collection should remind those frustrated travelers that while we were all grounded under fluorescent airport lighting, the cause for the worldwide travel snarl was, in fact, simply and stunningly beautiful: Sigurdsson, as ever, was there to capture it for us.

The Global Peace Initiative will be unveiling its second Peace Monument in the city of Liverpool, UK, on October 9, 2010. This monument has special significance on numerous levels. The location is chosen specifically as the place where John Lennon’s spirit was born. Its unveiling will occur on the day of Lennon’s birth, when he would have turned 70. It also coincides with the start of a two-month-long citywide festival celebrating Lennon and his spirit. The festival ends on December 9, 2010, 30 years, to the day, after Lennon’s assassination. (December 8, 1980 if you were stateside, December 9, 1980 if you were in Europe.)
     The vision of venerable art aficionado Ben Valenty, the California-based Global Peace Initiative was launched in 2003. The idea is to create seven monuments, one for each continent. The first, in Asia, was erected in Singapore in 2005. For the European installment, Valenty discovered and subsequently commissioned 19-year-old art prodigy Lauren Voiers of Ohio. Specializing in surrealist and cubist styles using oils, Voiers started by creating renderings of the monument. These renderings are transferred to three-dimensional representations and created in pieces. Voiers will then be hand-painting the 18-foot structure, which she has titled Peace and Harmony.

Internet buzz can destroy a band just as easily as it can build one up. People begin to form ideas and expectations before they have the chance to properly absorb the music, and overexposure is a constant risk. Sleigh Bells, the duo of songwriter/guitarist Derek E. Miller and singer Alexis Krauss, embody this perfectly. At first I just didn’t understand them, or their seemingly universal appeal. Many of Sleigh Bells’ songs are simple, sometimes to the point of being dumb. I was confused, and wondered how this silly music could be so beloved. And now, listening to Sleigh Bells’ debut — released after a handful of demos and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of blogger buzz — I’m just starting to get a handle on what they’re all about.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Buy this at iTunes.

Annie Havlicek, the wunderkind designer whose senior work as a student at Parsons was featured in the windows of Saks 5th Avenue, delivers for her spring/summer 2010 collection her interpretations of two Renoir paintings, Bal du Moulin de la Galette and Le Dejeuner des Canotiers — both works that depict young people gaily enjoying a summer’s day outdoors. Havlicek matches the light mood of the paintings with sheer, loose-fitting blouses, flowing silk dresses, and spots of lace, playing all the while with a coquettish femininity.
     She complicates the collection by adding to the overtly femme pieces a few preppy, masculine touches — structured shorts, skirts, and jackets as well as smartly tailored pants which reach to just below the knee. Havlicek coyly refers back to her source of inspiration by topping off the collection with a straw boater hat. With this collection and a newly established boutique, Havlicek confirms all early signs that she is a true talent and will make her mark on the fashion world.

Annie, Havlicek’s first boutique opened this past Saturday at 154 Orchard St. in the Lower East Side.